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In light of Anthem’s recent shutdown, the topic of games going away for good is once again a hot-button issue. Below, we examine this reality in a feature originally published in July 2025.
In a July 2025 shareholders meeting, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot made a salient yet obvious point about online video games: “You provide a service, but nothing is written in stone, and at some point, the service may be discontinued. Nothing is eternal.” He added: “Support for all games cannot last forever.”
This was in response to “Stop Killing Games,” a consumer movement that rallies against purported “planned obsolescence” of online video games from publishers. Sparked by the shutdown of Ubisoft’s The Crew, the movement has gained traction in the past year through petitions directly to European governments.
From a certain point of view, Guillemot sounds dismissive–like an elected official shrugging off constituent concerns about healthcare coverage by citing the inevitability of mortality. But the limited lifespan of modern live-service games is a reality that publishers and studios never address, at least publicly–or until it’s suddenly time to pull the plug. Rarely does an executive acknowledge that their online game will, one day, come to an end.
Whenever a company ships a
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